It isn’t a big secret that online reviews are becoming increasingly more important to measure the success of a business. In fact, they have become one of the significant ways that a company can measure itself against another business. It used to be that if you had more stores, more revenue, and more clients, you were viewed as more successful. This just isn’t the case anymore. Today, a collection of positive reviews will tell a customer everything they need to know about your company. It will also indicate if customers want to do business with you. While it may seem easy to draw a connection between success and a 5-star rating, this is not always the ideal situation.
Whether you want to believe it or not, 5-star reviews (or at least a 5-star average) might have the opposite impact from what you desire. You may be thinking, “well, what is the point of having an option for five stars if that is not optimal?” There are several reasons why this is the case, and we are going to cover them at length in this blog.
Too High
There have been many studies that have concluded that an average rating below five stars was the most optimal and trusted by consumers. According to the review agency Get Five Stars, “Consumers displayed more trust and were more likely to purchase a product when it’s rating was between 4.2 to 4.5 stars.”
With that being said, you should not strive to get five stars on every interaction. In other words, you should not reduce your amount of customer service just because getting five stars is not viewed as “optimal.” Receiving lower ratings may seem hard to a budding business. The reason for this is that when you first start, your company is new, and people can become excited about the new store in their area. You may find that you will have higher reviews as a result. However, once you have been in business a while and have garnered more reviews, you will find this may drop off. It is important to note, 1-star reviews are just as critical as any other review. It will provide you with a way to make changes to your company and make it even better.
Trust
It may sound counterintuitive, but lower ratings build customer trust. These high 5-star ratings bring with them a bit of skepticism. We have talked to several people, and most of them throw out the 5-star and 1-star reviews. They feel that the customers that are in the 2 to the 4-star range are the customers that are being the most honest. We have even talked to our customers and found that very few of them will award a company with a 5-star review ever. They feel that there is always room for improvement and even though they may not be able to single out a reason for the one less star, they will not award that last star.
The problem with the star system is that Google assigns a higher rank to higher ratings. Somehow in their infinite wisdom, they have not written an algorithm that takes very high scores into account. The same could be for very low ratings. However, we cannot lay the blame at Google’s feet entirely. As more and more people report that ratings play a factor in their decision, more and more businesses will try to boost their ratings and drop the ranks of their competitors. It is a double-edged sword. We demand ratings, but then the ratings are not always reliable — more on that in another blog.
Expectations
Now we are not saying that it does happen, but it seems that businesses pay people to give 5-star reviews. This gives customers an unreasonable expectation. They go into the company expecting the red-carpet treatment and get something less. This will cause them to do one of two things. They will either write a scathing review (something that will be hard to get rid of), or they will simply stop using your business. Either case is bad news for you. That is why we suggest that you never buy reviews. When you have organic reviews, your customers will have reasonable expectations of how you will treat them. The good news is if the customer goes in with reasonable expectations, and you exceed those expectations, you could wind up having a customer for life. That is always a good thing.
No Such Thing as Perfect
Instead of dwelling on the fact that you do not have a perfect review or testimonials page, take heart in knowing that you have real reviews. Do your best to embrace the positive reviews and manage the negative reviews. We have written several blogs on ways to manage both scenarios.
When you do get a negative review, make sure you acknowledge your customer. Then take the appropriate steps to correct the problem to avoid that same type of complaint. Customers only look back about three months to get a feel of the reviews. Anything older than that and they feel the adjustment has been made. That is assuming it is not a recurring complaint.
Conclusion
While this was more focused about a business than it was about an individual, all the same rules apply to an individual. There are many sites that have ratings for a single person. Some that come to mind are professor ratings, doctor ratings, and trade worker ratings. While we may want to think that having 5-stars is the most important thing in life, it is not. As studies showed, ratings between 4.2 and 4.7 are what you should be aiming for. It will garner more trust and give your customers reasonable expectations. At the end of the day, you need to be thankful that you have a review base that is 100% organic and truthful. You will reap the benefits of this. Just work hard to provide customer service to your clients, and you will have more than enough business and reviews to work with.